Section 15

15. The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend
first to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes
at once the
medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude
[physical extension] they proceed to bodies progressively
more earthy.
Some even plunge from heaven to the very lowest of corporeal forms;
others pass, stage by stage, too feeble to lift towards the
higher the
burden they carry, weighed downwards by their heaviness and
forgetfulness.

As for the differences among them, these are due to variation in
the bodies entered, or to the accidents of life, or to upbringing,
or to inherent peculiarities of temperament, or to all these
influences together, or to specific combinations of them.

Then again some have fallen unreservedly into the power of the
destiny ruling here: some yielding betimes are betimes too their
own: there are those who, while they accept what must be borne, have
the strength of self-mastery in all that is left to their own act;
they have given themselves to another dispensation: they live by the
code of the aggregate of beings, the code which is woven out of the
Reason-Principles and all the other causes ruling in the kosmos, out
of soul-movements and out of laws springing in the Supreme; a code,
therefore, consonant with those higher existences, founded upon
them, linking their sequents back to them, keeping unshakeably true
all that is capable of holding itself set towards the divine nature,
and leading round by all appropriate means whatsoever is less
natively apt.

In fine all diversity of condition in the lower spheres is
determined by the descendent beings themselves.